01 Dec 2009, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Die Bucher (the books), 0 Comments

Die Bucher (the books) – Doctorow’s Makers

When I read the first third of what would become Makers several years ago I was thrilled. Serialized by Salon.com around 2005, it was a weekly must read about systems being turned on their head. Specifically, the three main characters – Perry, Lester, and Suzanne – find themselves at the core of institutional change. Suzanne leaves a respected, but rapidly dying, job in “mainstream” journalism for the wild, woolly world of online reporting. Perry’s tinkering ways and an endlessly replenished pile of disposable culture do-dads creates “New Work”. And Lester? Let’s just say Doctorow’s coining of the term “fatkins” and all that comes with it is genius for how precognitive it is.

MAKERS is about change; not the change next month, or ten years from now, but the kind of industry roiling tumult you expect on Digg or Slashdot tomorrow. In the years since being stopped mid-serialization by Salon, Cory has parlayed the pieces into a full length novel. What happens to journalism when papers are no longer around? What happens to a culture that empowers those already swimming in abundance? How would an American squatter adhocracy function? Where does a preoccupation with superficial beauty end (*cough*)? The number of questions raised for those that like their global conscience with a side of sci fi is large.

Of course, sprinting through a gamut of big topics would be nothing if the story wasn’t engrossing. And Makers is that and more. Without revealing spoilers this is the first Doctorow book that nearly brought me to tears. The Epilogue was so moving not because Cory gives us the cold, calculated answers to the questions raised throughout. The characters here are not set pieces in an ideological screed. It was moving because Perry, Lester, and Suzanne have become real. That, much more than the intellectual fireworks from Cory’s Tomorrowland, is why I highly recommend this book.